The Truth About Alec Baldwin And Tina Fey's Relationship
Alec Baldwin may be getting shadier and shadier these days and we don't really see Tina Fey on-screen as much as we used to. However, once upon a time, they starred together on 30 Rock and made television gold together. "What creator/American sweetheart Tina Fey set out to do with her oddball workplace comedy was to... create a cartoon starring people," Newsweek once wrote. Two of those people were herself and Baldwin.
Airing from 2006 to 2013, the NBC show featured Fey as Liz Lemon, the head writer of a skit-based show (which mirrored her own experience with Saturday Night Live), who spends as much time wrangling her quirky staff as she does dealing with her flailing personal life. Baldwin appeared as Jack Donaghy, a rich and refined network executive, who is also Lemon's boss and someone who becomes a friend. "At the core of all the [30 Rock] wackiness is television's sweetest platonic relationship, that of Liz... and Jack... whose relationship fluidly shifts from boss-employee to mentor-mentee to brother-sister to therapist-patient, often in the span of a scene," Newsweek noted.
Together, Fey and Baldwin's characters helped the show earn six Golden Globes, as well as "another 80 wins" and "319 nominations" for additional industry honors, including Primetime Emmy Awards, People's Choice Awards, and more, according to IMDb.
While the pair clearly shared chemistry on-screen, it's also something that apparently sparked in real life.
Alec Baldwin says he 'fell in love' with Tina Fey
"When I first met Tina Fey — beautiful and brunette, smart and funny, by turns smug and diffident and completely uninterested in me or anything I had to say — I had the same reaction that I'm sure many men and women have: I fell in love," Alec Baldwin wrote in a 2017 cover story for Vanity Fair, which was an adaptation from his book, Nevertheless: A Memoir.
At the time, Fey was the head writer at Saturday Night Live, when Baldwin showed up to host an episode of the long-running show. Following the dress rehearsal, the actor asked someone who worked on SNL "if Tina was single." She wasn't.
The person that Baldwin had asked "pointed to a man sitting along the wall. Or maybe he was standing? This was Jeff Richmond, Tina's husband. Jeff is diminutive. Tina describes him as 'travel-size.'" The actor wrote that when he saw who Fey was married to, he thought to himself, "What's she doing with him? With his spools of curly brown hair and oversize eyes, Jeff resembles a Margaret Keane painting."
However, Baldwin explained that "years later ... [he] changed that to 'What's he doing with her?' Jeff, who was the talented composer and music supervisor on 30 Rock, is as loose and outgoing as Tina is cautious and dry." Baldwin may think that Fey is dry, but she happens to think he's pretty darn snazzy.
Tina Fey thinks Alec Baldwin is 'brilliant' and wrote his '30 Rock' role just for him
Alec Baldwin is obviously fond of Tina Fey, and despite never publicly declaring that she had fallen in love with him in the past the way he did when it comes to her, she apparently thinks pretty highly of him. "He's brilliant," Fey said during an interview on the BBC's Friday Night with Jonathan Ross back in 2010.
The actress and writer even admitted that she wrote the role of 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy for Baldwin specifically, saying, "He's so funny and had heretofore been known as as this dramatic leading man... But we actually auditioned a bunch of actors and met with a bunch of actors before I had the guts to approach him about it." Thankfully, Fey worked up the nerve and when Baldwin signed on, a comedy duo was born along with a hit show.
In fact, the comedy was so popular that it ended up inspiring an, er, adult movie, according to Fey, who admitted, "I actually haven't watched it, but I assume Liz and Jack go to town on each other." We'll just take her word on that. *Blush!*
Alec Baldwin almost reprised his '30 Rock' role for Tina Fey's new comedy
In her memoir Bossypants, comedian Tina Fey emphasized how educational her time with Alec Baldwin has been. "Anything I learned about real acting I learned from watching Alec Baldwin," she wrote. As Fey explained, "He can play the emotion at the core of a scene while reciting long speeches word for word and hitting all the jokes in the right rhythm. You would be surprised how many major, Oscar-winning movie stars cannot do this."
That's probably why, after 30 Rock wrapped, Fey approached Baldwin about reprising his character in a spinoff of the popular NBC comedy. Executive producers Fey and Robert Carlock wanted Baldwin to return as Jack Donaghy for Mr. Mayor, which would've followed the character in his new role as mayor of New York City. But while Baldwin "was in extended negotiations for the better part of a year," he pulled out of the project and was ultimately replaced by actor Ted Danson (per The Hollywood Reporter).
Danson's involvement, however, forced Fey and Carlock to alter the premise, as the L.A.-based Danson didn't want to move to NYC, so the creative duo reworked the concept to follow "a rich guy who runs for mayor of Los Angeles 'for all the wrong reasons'" (per Variety). And with numerous TV legends in the mix already, it's sure to be another hit for everyone involved with the project.
Tina Fey encouraged 'Saturday Night Live' to cast Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump
While Alec Baldwin's impersonation of Donald Trump has become an iconic part of Saturday Night Live's 45-year legacy, Baldwin's casting wasn't an accident. As creator Lorne Micheals revealed, Tina Fey was the mastermind behind his involvement. "She said, 'Well, the person that should really play [Trump] is Alec,'" Michaels told The Hollywood Reporter. "And I went, 'Yeah!' A light went on." And her suggestion has certainly made an impression on SNL's audience — and the White House, too.
"I'm not going to name names, but a cabinet member walked up to me at a restaurant in Manhattan... and he goes, 'I gotta tell you something. This thing you're doing is good, it's really good,'" Baldwin told THR. "He goes, 'I'll get fired if anybody quoted me saying this, but that's exactly what he's like when you do it.'"
Baldwin's portrayal even struck a nerve with the president himself. "The skits are terrible," Trump told TODAY (per Entertainment Weekly). "I mean, I like Alec, but his imitation of me is really mean-spirited and not very good. I don't think it's good. I do like him, and I like him as an actor, but I don't think his imitation of me gets me at all. And it's meant to be very mean-spirited, which is very biased. I don't like it."
Fey's input ultimately earned Baldwin an Emmy — oh, and the $1,400 per episode probably doesn't hurt either.